Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 26, 2012 @08:20AM
from the how-about-open-source-sexual-harassment-training? dept.

First time accepted submitter sprior writes "I'm looking for preferably open source software that a business would use to track vacation/sick days for employees and so far have come up empty. I found WaypointHR which looks defunct and I'm looking at OrangeHRM which looks half defunct, half bait and switch, and half strange in general with a bunch of website bugs thrown in. Along the way I've seen a couple of other OS projects which look defunct as well. I realize that a solution might be more than just vacation tracking because once you configure the employee info for a company you tend to want to use that for more than one thing. Paid solutions are a possibility."

My (20k employee) company hands out an A4 form every January with your total number of days entitlement written at the top. You keep it, and when you want holiday during the year, you write it down, subtract the total, and your manager signs it off. At the end of the year the form goes back to local HR, who file it.

At my company, they give you two weeks vacation that you can use any time you want. Well, except for dates when an important project is being worked on, which is all the time. Then on December 31st, when you haven't used any of your vacation, all your days go away because they don't roll over.
To get around this problem, I just take vacation whenever I want to, and if anybody calls me or sends me an e-mail, then it wasn't a vacation day. Then I keep track of how many extra hours I have worked and how many v

Libre Office Calc. You can make it as pretty or as ugly as you like, but either way, the functionality is limited mainly by your imagination combined with your level of expertise and/or willingness to invest the time to customize to your needs.

How do you associate the number of vacation days to which an employee is entitled? How to do you forward vacation requests to a manage for approval? How does Google Calendar deduct taken vacation from the pool that the employee has? How does the pool reset at the end of the year? Does Google calendar automatically add vacation days as an employee accrues them? What about vacation carry-over from one year to the next? Is there a mechanism to notify HR / management if an

A spreadsheet is a horrible idea. It does not scale well and only is effective if you have a single point of control.

My company uses spreadsheets to track the usage across 6 physical sites with 3 points of contact. There's essentially three sheets that are kept and must be periodically synced to verify data is identical. It's not reliable. I've seen one issue already where the number of days an employee had were off between the central point and the person who records for the site.

I wouldn't say it is a horrible idea, but you are correct in that it won't scale well. I have used spreadsheets successfully on teams as large as twenty, with everyone collocated at one facility. We simply had color coded cells to denote the reason for being out of the office, vacation, training, travel, etc... If the goal is to coordinate among a small(ish) group of people, then keep it simple. If you need to tie this into payroll and coordinate a large number of employees across several sites, then yo

THIS! Why build in additional bureaucratic bs when you can make your company an even better place to work? The US is infamous for making people work every minute of every day as it is - buck the trend, there are benefits for doing so...starting with this overhead.

Because the larger the working group gets, the more people need to know that Frank has a week off in two months time - otherwise someones going to book that very important meeting with that very important client slap bang in the middle of it. People are going to see that someones off at the same time as they require, and they are going to mark themselves down for vacation anyway and just argue it out later on.

But a vacation calendar should actually track more than just vacation time - it should track all planned and plan-able absence time. Vacations, lates, earlies, shift patterns, moved time, training periods etc etc etc. It should ideally track person dependencies - who cannot be off at the same time without serious authorisation. It should track banked hours and lieu time. It should track vacation preferences (I dont agree with it, but some companies give preference to those with children and families during known school holidays).

Theres an awful lot that a simple calendar or "just let them sort it out like adults" simply won't handle for you.

In answer to the parents question - I wrote my own, with all the above, about 10 years ago. I'd opensource it if I still had the code.

Because the larger the working group gets, the more people need to know that Frank has a week off in two months time - otherwise someones going to book that very important meeting with that very important client slap bang in the middle of it.

Hah! You think having vacation time on your calendar keeps them from doing that? Happens every friggin' time. Shared calendars aren't for YOU to manage your time, they are for the clerical staff to manage your time.

I'm betting those employees in that 1000 person company are not necessary to the sale or production of a service or product. I own part of a local family owned restaurant and surprise, the entire kitchen staff along with part of the wait staff decided they needed the entire weekend off to see a concert and recover from the experience. Of course this couldn't happen without closing down so the requests were granted on a first come first serve basis with me and some family members filling in to accommodate mo

Hire adults and let them self manage how much time they need off. They won't abuse it, they'll love you, and you can avoid this complex project.

Which is fine and dandy unless you have to comply with labor laws that require documentation of the amount of leave granted. Or accounting rules which require you to report earned time off as a liability.

Given how greatly companies differ in the details of their HR policies (when vacation accrues, what forms of paid leave are available, whether employees can 'buy' extra time off), I would be surprised if there is an off-the-shelf solution that fits your needs.

What he said. We had to roll our own. There is an astounding amount of "the devil is in the details" when dealing with this subject. For examples: How do you handle accrual of vacation/sick time for an employee whose start date is in the middle of a pay period? Is there a delay before they start accruing? Is there a maximum allowable amount? Does it increase based on seniority? How do you integrate your system with your time clock to deal with hourly employees (don't forget to credit them paid leave for hol

What he said. We had to roll our own. There is an astounding amount of "the devil is in the details" when dealing with this subject. For examples: How do you handle accrual of vacation/sick time for an employee whose start date is in the middle of a pay period? Is there a delay before they start accruing? Is there a maximum allowable amount? Does it increase based on seniority? How do you integrate your system with your time clock to deal with hourly employees (don't forget to credit them paid leave for holidays)? What if somebody is out for a span that includes the paid lunch hour? Will you allow entries that would cause the current balance to be pushed into the negative? If not, how will you forecast future remaining time, while taking all these rules into account?

This is one of those business cases where the ol' 80/20 rule just doesn't cut it. Just tracking who's here and who isn't is pretty simple, but when you start automating the payroll side of it, it becomes many times more complicated and customized.

Most of those can be answered with the term "pro-rate". Still, your point is valid - do you prorate or not?

What do you use to track days/hours worked? Isn't vacation accounting built into that system? If it's not, you're going to be running parallel non-communicating software which gives you multiple opportunities for the databases to get out of sync with reality, and each other.

The guy's question sounds like agonizing over the what color car to get before he has even picked out a car.

Vacation/sick days are something you track from within an employee hour tracking system that you should be worrying about first. And once you've chosen that, your solution is vacation/ sick day tracking becomes obvious.

There is no requirement to track employee hours for us, just days on leave. A spreadsheet on a shared drive worked for a while, but doesn't scale so we're looking for a distributed solution. We're primarily a Linux shop for servers (I'm sure we have some Windows servers as well) and will self host whatever solution is chosen.

You don't always need to track days/hours worked. For many salaried employees, you get paid an annual salary and your hours aren't really supposed to be tracked.

The vacation day policy lays on top of that. If you use more than you're supposed to, it's not that you're getting paid for more days than you're supposed to, it's that you're getting paid the right amount but you're also violating company rules/policies.

Yeah, I've worked "salaried - exempt" what have you jobs since 1990, no time clock, no overtime, no hour tracking.

Every single one of them tracked my days worked, sick days, vacation days, etc. with the same time tracking software used on hourly employees - only difference is that the "exempt" employees always get 80 hours, regardless of what's actually worked.

I even worked at a place that "didn't track" vacation time for higher level managers - some managers took two month long vacations

It's not Open Source, but if there's something specific you want, let me know and I can think about adding it. Or, if you'd like to purchase the entire source and open source it yourself, I'd be open to discussion.

That's planned in a future release. It makes the GUI a little more complex, and I want to keep it nice and simple for the single case scenario. Plus I want to handle some of those more odd accrual rules for when you have those multiple types (such as accrues on a yearly basis, no-rollover, etc).

If you wanted to track just two of them for now, you could use the free app and the paid app and have them track separately.

My own PTO days are tracked via a spreadsheet. My employer uses Excel, but I keep my own "shadow copy", usually in Google Docs spreadsheets (it has varied year-to-year).

There are plenty of open source spreadsheets. The first one that I really liked using, many years ago, was "sc", a curses/terminal-based spreadsheet that built upon the vi keyboard commands. It's still around somewhere. My housemates and I used it collectively (via shared directories with ACLs on NFS mounts) to track shared expenses. Th

Why the fuck you need open source? You aren't going to modify it, you just think open source is synonymous with free.My company uses its book keeping / payroll software to do this, but from reading the comments here, apparently america doesnt have humanevacation / sick days forced upon employers, I guess its that "free market" thing that works so well...

While open source is also a bias of mine, I've also already looked at the source of the packages I've been considering partially for documentation. I've also got a history of taking open source packages and making some tweaks to fit the requirements a bit more. An active developer community around a project is also a critical indicator of liveliness in software and whether it continues to be viable. Note that I said that non-free packages will also be considered, open source is just a preference.

Open Source Software usually has gaps in Business software.First OSS developers tend to have a negative views towards companies. Making free software so a company can make more money just doesn't sit right. OSS does tend to give tools for the IT side of business but a lot less on the side of the people with Suits.

Second OSS developers are mostly on IT and really don't have a big picture understanding on how to operate a business. (some of them do, but most don't, judging by a lot of the idiotic comments from FSS supporters on how business need to operate) So most OSS Business systems tend to be small and only work for the company the product was designed for, and rarely ever useful in an other company.

shameless plug (I work for this company) but there is timeoffmanager.com [timeoffmanager.com]
it's not open-source, but it's web based, free to try, and with lots of customizable options for different hr policies, and we offer great customer support

While open source is also a bias of mine, I've also already looked at the source of the packages I've been considering partially for documentation. I've also got a history of taking open source packages and making some tweaks to fit the requirements a bit more. An active developer community around a project is also a critical indicator of liveliness in software and whether it continues to be viable. Note that I said that non-free packages will also be

Intergration with other tools like the authentication server for terminating access when an employee gets fired seems like a simple addition that carries quite a few variables that would deter a company from developing it.

It may be overkill, but TimeTrex Time and Attendance [timetrex.com] is open source and has a scheduling module with complete accrual tracking and employee self-service for requesting time off. It does a bunch of other stuff too (ie: attendance, payroll), but that can all be disabled in the permission system if you don't want to bother with it.

There is a gambas application on sourceforge: Employear, to keep holidays but also normal working days, etc. It is a Linux desktop application written in Gambas, a Java-like language with a Visual Basic like development environment. It stores data in MySQL database. It makes sense to take an open source app; we adjusted some small thing so that we can read data from a timetracker system to auto-fill the normal, worked days.. We use for some years now; the monthly totals are delivered to HRM for payroll

I had built an RoR 2.x version based PTO tool to learn RoR (a copy of our company's HTML & JS based tool) but never got around to releasing it. I was going to upload it to heroku.com but was waiting to port it to v3.x If you want I can upload it to github and you can take it from there.

It's funny... Every company I've worked for has built this application over and over... different languages, different platforms to integrate with different generations of desktop / networked calendaring, etc... and even different versions for different departments when there's variation allowed on a per-manager basis. It seems like it's always a bespoke, in-house sorta thing. It's also usually treated as the "get started" application when switching technology platforms... "If we can figure out how to bui

We're a company of about 400 people so off-the-shelf calendar applications wouldn't fit. So when this issue came up, we decided to build our own. It took about a month for a sole programmer, but at least it matches our company requirements perfectly.

I'm REALLY not a PHB/MBA type, but an experienced programmer trying to explore off the shelf options before I go an implement something from scratch which is a diversion from my normal responsibilities and a problem which I assume others have had to deal with.

I've been looking at OrangeHRM for a couple of days and have it installed in a virtual machine. However a few things have made me cautious:

- The registration page on their website to download the documentation doesn't work.- I called their "global" technical support number to report that their registration page doesn't work and got voicemail.- They haven't called me back 2 days later.- The wiki site for their community version has almost no content and has been polluted with spam links that haven't been cl